A chat between Donuts: Brazil <> Portugal

The “Donut Brasil” group was formed in May around curiosity and interest in the vision proposed by the methodology to understand our complex challenges and drive the urgent changes we need to face as humanity. Still in the structuring phase, our exchanges are made in a Whatsapp group, which already has more than 60 people, in addition to 3 virtual meetings already held, when we advance in understanding our goals and build a roadmap to achieve them. As part of this initial Journey, on September 30th (DEAL's birthday!) we held a Brazil/Portugal meeting with the presence of Vasco Moreira Rato and Adolfo Chautón Pérez who kindly shared with 17 participants from the Brazilian group their experiences and challenges @Donut Portugal faces after the initiative was boosted by Kate Raworth's participation in an event on Climate Change earlier this year.

Here are some insights of the conversation:

• It´s important to understand the role of governance, including systems and platforms for communication and interaction. Portugal chose to use Miro, Slack and Telegram, highlighting the intense use of the latter;

• A central leadership may be relevant at the beginning, but it must move towards being distributed, adopting a rotational dynamics, due to the voluntary characteristic of the participants. Interests and needs alternate, as should leaders to boost and maintain high engagement in line with the paths pointed out by the group;

• “The more people step forward, the more distributed leadership will be. It´s a citizen´s network and it should not be afraid of failure”, Adolfo observed ;

• It is noticed that the groups are aligned by affinities recognized in the forums interactions, and should evolve around common interests regarding organization and autonomy;

• There is a great challenge in fostering  the social dimension in the Donut dialogue, still dominated by environmental lenses;

• It is clear that the deployment of the model into practical projects must focus on the concept of “places” in order to scale. It seems to be na assertive strategy to enhance engagement, incorporate demands, challenges and impacts that are legitimate and relevant to the territories and its participants, including rural areas;

• The Academy has an important role in activating the Donut journey, especially during and ideation phase, as well as to enable prototype methodologies and developments, such as “City Portraits”, considering the university environment itself as the “hub” and object of the place to be transformed.

• It is important to be aware that the diagnosis will always be incomplete and that the main effort is to collectively understand, identify and relate the challenges in order to ask the best questions and inspire the best choices for the territories;

• As an economic model, its practice is important, as well as the observation of its application in different territories, as boosters of the economy. “It is society that makes the Economy”;

• It´s desirable to identify and articulate existing initiatives to promote dialogues in the light of the community, understanding how they are projected in specific local realities as part of the strategic orientation to downscale the Doughnut.

The group came out very motivated to evolve in its structuring phase, build common collective goals sparkled by individual intentions and accelerate the transformations that we need as society and human beings living in this planet (not Mars...). Thank you Vasco and Adolfo for sharing and inspiring!

Here´s the link for those in the mood to practice some Portuguese :)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WX6SBDtbQVDHCGBN9z_DRAA-q6D_XQnR/view